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Government Agencies

For years, government watchdog groups have chronicled numerous instances of waste and abuse — at the very least — at the Centers for Disease Control and its National Institutes for Health.

An establishment press corps doing its job, upon hearing the director of the National Institutes for Health claim that "if we had not gone through our 10-year slide in research support, we probably would have had a vaccine" for Ebola by now, and especially upon hearing leftist poltiticians then claim that it's all Republicans' fault, would look into whether part of the problem might be poor bureacratic stewardship. But they're not doing their job.

Early this morning, Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post's designated fact-checker gave the left's claims that Republicans alone were responsible for alleged "cuts" to Ebola research four Pinocchios (i.e., a "whopper").

That's nice, but it hardly undoes the damage news outlets like the Associated Press have inflicted on the truth in the apparent name of ginning up resentment among low-information voters. I'll get to that, but first, here are the key passages from Kessler's critique, which essentially gets down to who's responsible for sequestration (the correct answer is that it was President Obama and the White House; bolds are mine throughout this post):

The federal government's latest fiscal year ended on September 30. The final Monthly Treasury Statement for the fiscal year, will likely be published during the coming week or possibly a few days later.

From time to time, commenters at NewsBusters have pointed that Uncle Sam's reported deficits don't represent the whole story. They are certainly right. While the press is all excited over this week's Monthly Budget Review released by the Congressional Budget Office, which contain an unofficial but probably accurate estimate that the fiscal 2014 budget deficit was "only" $486 billion, the national debt has grown by far more than that.

This morning, I received two identical daily briefing emails from USA Today. The subject line was "Life Expectancy in USA Reaches Record High."

As USA Today's web-page version of the email shows, the email body contained no link to or mention of a life-expectancy related article. Giving the paper the benefit of the doubt, I clicked on the email's "5 things you need to know Friday"; it also has nothing on the topic. After searching for and finding Larry Copeland's related article and doing just a little research, it's clear that the news, while indeed a record, is not anywhere near as encouraging as the reporter's cheerleading content would indicate (bolds are mine):

In a sign that the historical revisionists and Barack Obama legacy builders at the Associated Press, aka the Administration's Press, may have shifted their operation into high gear for the final weeks of the midterm election campaign, Andrew Taylor has written that "Obama inherited a trillion-dollar-plus deficit after the 2008 financial crisis."

The occasion for Taylor's tripe is the Congressional Budget Office's release of its final Monthly Budget Review for fiscal year 2014. In the report, which the AP has almost always ignored in every other month in favor of waiting for the official Monthly Treasury Statement issued shortly thereafter, the CBO estimates that the year's budget deficit will come in at "only" $486 billion. A grab of Taylor's original full five-paragraph blurb, which has since been revised while still containing the "inherited" claim, follows the jump:

The dictionary tells us that "a few" is "a small number of persons or things." Though there is some ambiguity in the guidance I have reviewed, it's fair to say that "Generally a few is more than 2."

Not at the Associated Press, where "a few" can apparently be two, at least when it comes to "fact-checking" President Obama's grandiose claims in his Thursday speech at Northwestern University. Thanks to Obama's primary contention that "it is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than when I took office," any economy-related statistic was fair game for the AP's Christopher Rugaber. But the AP reporter chose only to address two nitty-gritty items, while avoiding any attempt to evaluate Obama's core assertion.

On Thursday, President Barack Obama did something Republicans have inexplicably been reluctant to do. He nationalized the impending midterm elections by telling a friendly audience at Northwestern University that "I am not on the ballot this fall ... But make no mistake: These policies (of my administration) are on the ballot -- every single one of them."

That evening on Fox News's Special Report hosted by Bret Baier, in video seen after the jump (HT Real Clear Politics), George Will was ready with some facts and a deadly redistributionist riposte on how Obama's policies have worked out in the real world, including in the President's home state, during the past six years:

Psaki's thankless and impossible task was to defend the administration against former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's assessment that U.S. troops completely left Iraq too early. Video and the damning portions of the transcript follow the jump:

Bill O'Reilly's opening talking points on his show tonight went after President Obama's claim that the intelligence community underestimated and did not adequately communicate the dangers of ISIS/ISIL in Iraq and Syria with both barrels.

As documented in several NewsBusters posts in the 48-plus hours since Obama's Sunday night "60 Minutes" interview, O'Reilly's no-holds-barred analysis assessment, as seen in the video which follows the jump, is a stark contrast to what has been seen on other broadcast networks:

Steve Kroft's interview of Barack Obama was the focus of this past Sunday's episode of "60 Minutes" on CBS. It has become noteworthy primarily because of Obama's statement that U.S. intelligence agencies "underestimated what had been taking place in Syria." As several previous NewsBusters posts have shown (examples here, here, here, and here), the press is working mightily to minimize how the intelligence community and the Pentagon are pushing back, hotly disputing the President's assertion.

Another noteworthy development is that the network's audience for the Obama interview was down 69 percent in the 18-49 demographic from the show's previous episode. The vast majority of press reports noting the ratings slide, as compiled by Kristinn Taylor over at Gateway Pundit, are not mentioning that it was Obama's show.

At the item's top is the iconic "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door" photo showing onetime segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace "try(ing) to block the entry of two black students" into the University of Alabama. The aforementioned article title appears beneath the words "History Dept." The magazine is clearly trying to lead anyone not old enough to remember or anyone unfamiliar with U.S. history to believe that Wallace, who ran for president as a Democrat in 1964 and 1976 and as an Independent in 1968 and 1972, was a Republican. The writeup by Doug McAdam and Karen Kloos waits a dozen mostly long paragraphs before finally tagging Wallace as a Democrat.

ABC's Jonathan Karl is on a tear — and his editorial bosses at ABC seem determined to ignore him.

As Scott Whitlock at NewsBusters noted earlier today, Karl on Friday "grilled White House press secretary Josh Earnest ... about claims that al Qaeda had been 'decimated,'" mainly because it hasn't been. Instead, it seems like there are at least ten times as many versions. The network televised none of the exchange. Tonight, NB's Curtis Houck wrote that ABC was among the networks which ignored how "several sources in the intelligence community disputed President Obama’s comments" about how they had supposedly underestimated the ISIS/ISIL threat. It turns out that ABC was silent even though Karl wrote a scathing column this afternoon which named specific names (bolds are mine):

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